It's a gift of food that has me in a panic!

I was gifted 50 pounds of carrots. For 2 people that's a lot. So there's canning and dehydrating and freezing. I'm in healthcare so with the shortage of hands I am scheduled 13 more 12 hour shifts this month ( today is 13 august)  as you can see time Is a hurdle. Suggestions please!

If you have a juicer, you could make carrot juice. Marvelous for drinking, soups, popsicles and other sweet delights.  One pound carrots makes about a cup of juice: 50 lbs, 50 cups ~3 gallons of carrot juice. Earthworms love the leavings. Juice freezes well.

If you have the freezer space, chop them all and freeze them. You can dehydrate from there
(fill your first dehydrator run right away and get it started), and canning requires the most time. If you can skip canning, it'll go a lot faster. If you can't skip canning, try to do all your chopping the night before, so you need a smaller block of time to can.

If you are determined to can, and have decent fridge space, you might chop it all, measure out how much you need for canning, put that in the fridge. Fill the dehydrator, see how much it takes, leave that much in the fridge for second batch, freeze the rest, go back in a day or three and package the freezer stuff that you will keep frozen into better packages.

Chopping is easiest, at least for me, to do it as one run, only have to clean up twice (before and after) and deal with compost once, and I find starting and stopping takes up a lot more time.

Good luck! I'm envious, I want 50 pounds of carrots!!

FIFTY pounds!  For two people!

It's not a gift, it's an obligation for you!

Do you have a metal garbage can, some straw or sawdust, and a shady spot to dig a deep hole?
Dig the hole, install the garbage can backfilling with dirt so it touches the sides of the can, but leaves a wider space at the top for managing the lid. Layer carrots and straw/sawdust in the can until the can is full. Put the lid on. Use an old pillow case/tshirt with the openings sewn shut to hold straw/sawdust to cover the lid with. When you need more fresh carrots or have some extra time for processing, fish out as many as you want. Depending on the weather, you may want to find something to cover it over with - old plywood/piece of roofing etc for example.

Might as well bring them to work with you and start handing them out...

We would make some into ginger carrot pickle. Make some carrot cake, carrot soup, eat about 1 pound a day of carrots(especially with home made mayo:D). It not like they will go bad overnight if they are not preserved.


We personally would do a combination of everything. Give some away, preserve some, Keep some for cooking, keep some in the freezer/fridge.

I'd probably just store most of them. I'm a fan of the garbage can storage that Jay mentioned. Digging a hole doesn't take much time, and then it's there for future use.

A friend of mine bought 50lbs of carrots once and just took the shelves out of his fridge and put the whole bag in. Maybe someone's giving away an old fridge you could use. I went to his once and he had the bag of carrots and about 10lbs of lemons in his fridge. That was it. He must have been doing a juice fast or something 🤔

I stored carrots from my garden in the drawers in my fridge for months. I put a damp towel on the bottom of each drawer, filled the drawer with carrots, then put another damp towel on top. Whenever I noticed the top towel was dry, I'd rewet it. The carrots stayed crisp. Be careful if you fill up a drawer that's not supported on the bottom when you pull it out. Carrots are heavy!

If you juice a bunch of them, the pulp is really good mixed up into sandwich/cracker spread. Just put in whatever you'd use for egg or tuna salad and tweak from there for your tastes.

I wouldn't freeze them without blanching first. They get a weird rubbery texture otherwise.

Jay Angler wrote:Do you have a metal garbage can, some straw or sawdust, and a shady spot to dig a deep hole?
Dig the hole, install the garbage can backfilling with dirt so it touches the sides of the can, but leaves a wider space at the top for managing the lid. Layer carrots and straw/sawdust in the can until the can is full. Put the lid on. Use an old pillow case/tshirt with the openings sewn shut to hold straw/sawdust to cover the lid with. When you need more fresh carrots or have some extra time for processing, fish out as many as you want. Depending on the weather, you may want to find something to cover it over with - old plywood/piece of roofing etc for example.

Does this work in warm / hot climates? I just checked the weather for Azusa and it’s similar to what I’m experiencing at the moment - lows of 20’C highs of 35’C (60-97’f). Sounds like an awesome solution.

Edward Norton wrote:

Jay Angler wrote:Do you have a metal garbage can, some straw or sawdust, and a shady spot to dig a deep hole?
Dig the hole, install the garbage can backfilling with dirt so it touches the sides of the can, but leaves a wider space at the top for managing the lid. Layer carrots and straw/sawdust in the can until the can is full. Put the lid on. Use an old pillow case/tshirt with the openings sewn shut to hold straw/sawdust to cover the lid with. When you need more fresh carrots or have some extra time for processing, fish out as many as you want. Depending on the weather, you may want to find something to cover it over with - old plywood/piece of roofing etc for example.

Does this work in warm / hot climates? I just checked the weather for Azusa and it’s similar to what I’m experiencing at the moment - lows of 20’C highs of 35’C (60-97’f). Sounds like an awesome solution.

It depends how deep the hole is, whether you insulate the top or not, and how cool the things you put into it are. If you plunk 50lbs of warm carrots into a shallow hole, you won't get much benefit.

I'd say a hole deep enough to fit a garbage can, in the shade, with insulation over the top would be pretty effective. It won't be as good as a fridge, obviously, but it'll extend the life of the carrots enough to ease the panic and get through them at a more leisurely pace.

When we first moved onto our property we had a "cold hole" for food storage, a hole maybe 2.5' deep, lined with boards to keep out rodents and dirt, with an uninsulated plywood lid. I think I remember carrots would keep about a month in there before growing roots. We were opening it multiple times a day and putting warm stuff in sometimes, which would raise temperatures. Our summers have very similar temperatures as those described.

I would suggest dehydrating some and juicing some since both of those methods take up the least amount of space.

Since carrots keep well in the fridge why not set a few pounds aside in the fridge while you are deciding what to do with all 50 pounds?

Some folks like fermented carrots and say that feremented foods can be stored in a cabinet without refrigeration.

If I had been gifted 50 pounds of carrots I would not panic.  I would just do my best with want I can do.  And later when this tasks has been completed I would then enjoy the gift.

Please let us know what lovely things you made with those carrots.

We store garden carrots in our spare fridge, in plastic bags with paper towels in them. To control humidity, we change the paper towels when they are visibly damp. We still have carrots from last fall that are okay for cooking.

Re the gift carrots, I would store as much as I wanted and immediately re-gift the rest to the local food bank. As long as they're not wasted, the spirit of the gift has been respected.

Edward Norton wrote:Does this work in warm / hot climates? I just checked the weather for Azusa and it’s similar to what I’m experiencing at the moment - lows of 20’C highs of 35’C (60-97’f). Sounds like an awesome solution.

I admit my US geography is crappy, but I gathered it was south enough that I suggested it would require hay on top for insulation. That said, adding a couple of pop bottles with ice in them to get the temp down a little to start, might help also - fake it cooler! It sounds as if Jan's made it work under worse conditions, so hopefully it would be enough to give Rebecca a chance to get on top of the problem.

However, I will also suggest that if some of them end up being a gift to the Compost Gods, that will simply feed the soil for next year. We have a number of fruit trees that produce fruit that just doesn't keep/store. The animals will only eat some much of it, also. At some point, I have to accept that this is part of the circle of life  - use as much as you can, but don't regret when some goes to feed the soil.

I would sort out a bunch of the best looking carrots, rinse them off and put them in zip top plastic bags and store in the veggie drawer of the refrigerator.  

The next batch  would be scrubbed and them run through my food processor with a slicing disk. Blanch the carrot disks and  freeze some of them in meal sized freezer bags.  I would put the rest of them in the dehydrator.   Dehydrated carrot chunks are great in soups and stews in the winter. The rest would be shared with friends and family.  

I have childhood memories of riding around in a grocery cart on top of 50 pound bags of carrots. Many many times...My parents were maniacal juicers and I can't even stand the smell of carrot juice at this point in my life. But it is the fast way to grind (ha) through 50# worth in a hurry. I do like lacto-fermented carrots and would probably do a whole lot of butter braised carrots in a slow cooker and them freeze them (and then roast them a tiny but to brown up this winter).

Just a bump and follow-up -- we still have many bags of nice carrots from Sept/Oct last year. Yes, there is an energy cost for refrigeration but not much less (I suppose) than the energy cost of shipping rubbish carrots across the continent and pretending they are tasty.

The point is, this is possible. We have been doing this for decades, and my parents for decades before that. Carrots for the revolution! LOL.

I would leave them in a single layer on a countertop, out in the sun, on a rack, etc. to dry. Maybe after chopping them. Whenever I leave parsnips out like this they always taste sweeter. I haven’t ever had enough carrots to preserve… they could also be cut into quarters and made into thinner sticks of carrot, which should be easier to break apart and use.

I made about 5.5 L of fermented carrot sticks at Christmas when there was a special on (£0.08 per kg).  I just left the jars on the countertop until there was space in the fridge for them.  These mainly went into soups and stews--I treated them as fresh carrots and just chucked them in whatever I was cooking.  Also worked well on a salad, minced up.  

The husband bought another 10 kg last week because they were on special again, even though I told him we didn't need any more!--but as we're down to our last 500 mL of Christmas ones, I got the big jars back out and filled them up again.  And we ate around a kg a day for about five days running...

G Freden wrote:I made about 5.5 L of fermented carrot sticks at Christmas when there was a special on (£0.08 per kg).  I just left the jars on the countertop until there was space in the fridge for them.  These mainly went into soups and stews--I treated them as fresh carrots and just chucked them in whatever I was cooking.  Also worked well on a salad, minced up.  

Interesting! Can you give us your recipe and describe the process? How long do you think they would stay nice in a cool place like a root cellar?

Thanks Douglas, it's really quick and simple.  

I cut them up into matchsticks (the newer batch are in rounds using a mandolin), packed them into large Kilner jars and filled up with water, adding 1.5 T of salt per L of volume;  my jars are 1.8 L, so not quite 3 T of salt per jar.  Some people use a different ratio of salt and water but I err on the saltier side;  the way I cook them is forgiving of a bit of extra salt (adding to a stew or soup, with less or no salt added to the broth).

Then the jars are closed and put onto a cloth on my countertop (to catch any spillage) until they stop bubbling over, or until I have space in the fridge.  I'll release the seal/gasses a couple of times while fermentation is really active, but after a couple of days I just leave them closed.  I've kept this kind of fermented veg on my countertop all summer long before, and if it's not opened at all it doesn't usually go bad (just pretty sour)--not particularly with carrot sticks but with a variety of other veg including cucumbers, sauerkraut, etc.